1. Black hole bookshelf mumbo jumbo. But as they did go that route, I would have preferred if they just had a long scene of white bright light and coopers talking/thinking in the background. Trying to portray a 5 dimensional portal to past and future just looked awful and silly. As they said, we cant comprehend it so why even bother trying to show it…
2. Stupid and illogically designed robot helpers with alot of needless humour for a dystopian drama movie.
I think i mentioned it earlier, but when the robat takes control of the docking process it actually uses its "arm" to control a joystick…Seriously…
3. Someone pointed this out already, but the spaceship could magically decend/ascend from first the waterplanet then the iceplanet without the need for additional engines. Just like star wars…
4. Completely needless action scene at the waterplanet, with a needless death. The one standing next to the spaceship the entire time somehow ends up dead, yet the one far far away and somehow unexplainably trapped under some wreckage survives….what the hell?
5. Once again needless heroic hollywood trash when cooper decided to send his only surviving companion alone to the last and "possibly" inhabitable planet while he himself goes for some sacrificing blackhole suicide, all this without even giving her a chance to decide for herself.
Had they both gone into the black hole she wouldnt have to be trapped all alone on some planet in another galaxy.
which leads me to…
6. At the end cooper goes on a quest to find this lady he forced to land on an unknown planet all alone.
I expect that in this future, mankind has indeed unlocked the secret of FTL travel thanks to his black hole experience. But does he know where to go? If so, why doesnt everyone else? And if they do, why havent they retreived her yet?
The fans of ED that we are, we know that our collective effort still wont discover the entirely of even our own galaxy, yet cooper decides to go on a hunt in the rest of the UNIVERSE to find this future love of his.
Okay there is more that annoyed the hell out of me in this movie, but I want to say that the only reason I feel so disappointed is because I expected so much. Nolan and hard sci-fi sounded too good to be true, and apperently it was.
Ill rewatch this movie on blueray down the line, and probably find it much more enjoyable as a regular sci-fi movie, but IMO Nolan hit the post with this one :/
Id rate it 3/5 overall, though acting and visuals where mostly superb!
I agree with most of your points, even though they didn't bother me too much (it's still a movie after all), but a couple of things:
- They used the disposable booster rocket in order to bring the ship into orbit without tapping into is own fuel reserves, which were required for the mission. It would have been reckless to use that fuel for the first take off if you still had other means to get them up there.
- You keep calling the black hole dangerous, but it isn't. A black hole has less mass than the star that it was before it collapsed, because the star died in a supernova, shedding most of its outer layer during the explosion. This is the real logical problem here, because that supernova would have ejected the planets into deep space.
Assuming that the planets are still there by movie magic: at regular distances the black hole has less gravitational pull than its former star, which - thanks to the inverse square law of gravity - should barely affect the rest of the system, except loosen up the orbits a bit. This only changes once you get close enough to the black hole for the exponential increase of gravity with closer proximity to have a real effect, all the way up to the event horizon, where the gravitational force exceeds the escape velocity of light. You'd have to get very close to the black hole to get in trouble, though. Closer than you would have been able to get to its former star, when it was still alive and kicking.
For all intents and purposes the average black hole is nothing but a tiny dark star, and not the all consuming stellar vacuum cleaner that people believe it to be. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but that's my understanding of black holes.
I saw the movie "Interstellar" last night... It was fabulously "Spacey" just like Elite, and there were some very super cool Spaceship Flying Action ! Edge of Seat stuff with a good story line too, but you need to be a bit of a space nut to truly understand some of the concepts presented.
Has anybody seen that movie too? What did you think of it?
I've been ready some of the reviews and critique of the movie, and yes I agree there were a couple of flaws that defy logical explanations. For me however, I liked the movie because it gave me something to think about after the movie.
It made me wonder that what we now call as being "living in the present", may be a possibility that someone or something (perhaps God?) might have already been through all the generations of advance communication abilities or technological inventions, and could be placing markers on our Planet already helping us with future endeavours! Perhaps the Pyramids were built (or helped) by advanced civilisations who once had interstellar powers??? (Just some food for thought...)
Big Nolan fan but this left me cold, which was surprising given my interest in most Sci Fi films, and this being Nolans most emotional piece. I actually felt it fell far too much into smushy sentimentality, the dialogue was bad at times where characters spouted exposition after exposition instead of an actual conversation.
I just thought there was a severe lack of fun in the film, it's the first Nolan movie I personally would never want to watch again. Even in his darkest films like Momento I have always wanted to revisit them, but not this one.
Looked glorious in 70mm IMAX though, it really did the spectacular, spectacularly.
I don't care what the so called space science experts of this forum say. I loved this film and found very entertaining, even if it wasn't so educating. Which is good point! Should we be forced to endue sciencetifically accurate films about space travel at the expense of removing the fictional, but very entertaining Star-Wars aspects of it. Unless they are using the film to train future astronauts. I say no!
While the film was slow to start, it got interesting when NASA was introduced. Yet, that scene where the father and daughter experience a anomaly when they were trespassing and got very meaningful by the time what's his name was trapped behind the book case after falling from his ship in the vortex and saw the same thing happening from a different perspective that somehow brought a almost physical connection between both scenes and the moments they occurred. Like that scene where he's see's it happening later on was the same reason it happened in the first place.
Not sure how that part ended either, I because would often zone out from the physical exhaustion of walking to the cinema to see this in my local town. I know I was zoned out during the beginning of the film.
What else can I remember that I wanted to say while watching this.....
I have become quite a fan of seeing the character lead's (I know his name, but I couldn't be bothered with the correct spelling.) other film Contact, Tropic Thunder (I had to watch this again or most of it back when I made a comment about Going the Full on the Beta Discussion Forum.) Surfer (I think that was the name, but he excels in those roles and this even has some imagined relevance on my part to this film. Which I will share with you all later on!) Reign of Fire (Almost un-recogisable with out the hair and normally clean shaven face and a Dragons - Slayer as well!) Dazed and Confused (With a typical seventies styled neck length hair with a comb over.) and Mud. Then there is Michael Cain! Seen him in a lot of films as well. I could say more about the latter, but I relate to the former better or I guess I would like to think that I do. More and hopefully not in ways that he or people that know him may find insulting. Anyway, If he knew me, I'd say he would say I'm nothing like him and what I really mean is that I see him more as a role model in some of his film roles. I even heard he grew up in the middle of north and south east coast of Queensland.
Anyway, getting back to the film. It looks larger than life, even on a regular cinema screen. It does have a certain Imax quality even without the actual screen in question and the film soon picks up when they are taken into the secret base and shown around and then he's in space with the rest of the crew. I should mention the girl playing the daughter of Michael Cain. I can only recall her in one of the latest Batman movies as Catwoman and I'm sure she's been in a few. I only liked here when she was younger and with longer hair. Not that I should be that picky when referring to a female celebrity and for one so desperate as myself. Moving on we soon introduced to the young male actor I recall seeing in a few films like Ghost-Rider, (The Villainous son of the Demon boss (Peter Fonda who gave the other lead character Nick Cage his powers!) Hunger-Games (With that unforgettable beard!) and some young photographer from a much earlier film with Kevin Spacey as his girlfriends father and she was hard to forget as well (Except for her name which escapes me right now!) when going topless for the first time!.
Now between being zoned out and having a lot of the plot and technical stuff of this film go over the top of my head. I do understand that the earth was going apocalyptic and that NASA had the means to find another world to live on after being given.....
Sorry, to do this but I so tired right now ....... I will finish this later!
I also just saw this film in IMAX last night, definately they way to see it if you can.
I dont think I have made so many different faces whilst watching a film, the impact of the IMAX and vibrations of the sound system were nearly overwhelming in some places (like the wave riding scene!).
I loved it, perhaps beacuse I do understand the physics (wouldn't most of its target audience?), especially the robots who were IMO the best characters (the humour stuff in particular)
Watched it yesterday, and while i did enjoy it i was expecting much more.
Overall i think nolan aced it by putting focus on the emotional and human aspect of things, but i found some scenes unneccesary, as if they just had to throw some action in there, but completely out of place and illogical.
Was expecting something a bit more "science" and little less "fiction" overall.
And the AI "droids" was an aweful and silly design.
Not sure about incomprehensible, but often cringey. Anyone that has seen the movie will surely have facepalmed at the explanation of the wormhole to the supposedly intelligent lead character. It was embarrassing.
More like "incomprehensible to the uneducated". They dumbed it down quite a bit and did a lot of unnecessary exposition and repetition to make these concepts really clear for the average movie goer. Still, I commend Interstellar for taking it even that far, in a world where other movies claim that supernovae can destroy whole galaxies (Star Trek (2009)).
Yeah, they looked alot like the monolith aswell!
While they served up some funny moments, i still found them horribly designed.
I sighed long and hard when it reached out its "arm" and grabbed the joystick...
So, I haven't made up my mind whether its a really great movie or not.
Its a beautifully shot and well acted movie and reasonably thought provoking and lots of human emotion too, pretty much on par with what I'd expect from Nolan.
Now I may require a rewatch as I'm not entirely sure I got the full picture in a few places, but honestly, my heart sank at some (what I thought) fairly basic science oversights and cheesy explanations dialogue.
[WARNING: Spoilers in my points below. You really don't want to open those spoiler tags if you're still intending to watch the movie. I MEAN IT!]
Some of the things that spoiled my immersion. As I said, I might not have got the full gist of it on the first watch, but these points did sort of rattle my meter a bit, and I can usually stretch my plausibilty belief framework pretty far.
We've just been caught trespassing a highly secret NASA base and we find out our old professor is running the show there, so hey, a massive conicidental get-out-of-jail-free card. Exactly one hour later our hero is told that the program simply cannot get off the ground without his involvement. Now that may well have been correct, but this decision was made in ONE HOUR? Really? Before that, Cooper didn't even exist to them and an hour later he's in on the program without even going for an interview or meeting the original pilot in command.
Yaay, we're going to space. The way we get up there is to use a 3 stage rocket before we attain orbit with our cool little shuttle ship thing. Great, even looked believable. So then we head on through a wormhole and we land on other planets with the same little shuttle which can now seemingly punch through the atmosphere on its own without any further need for multi stage rockets. So why did we need them for Earth?
Alright cool, we've left earth and docked with our spinny not-really-station station, lets spin her up to get some gravity. OK, cool, we got gravity now (but really we're still sitting in the little shuttle ship which is right in the center where, um, theres almost no centrifugal force and thus no gravity, yet eveyone is walking around just fine)
So, um, lets see, it takes 18 months to fly out past Saturn, hit the wormhole, and now we're through, OK, lets quickly just fly to one of those three planets over there quickly. It'll take maybe a day or so now, so no need to bother going back into hibernation (speculation, but all travel in the new solar system seemed to happen in moments)
Why is it (in Hollywood sci fi) that whenever a wormhole appears in our solar system that it will have an exit point in a galaxy completely different from our own. I mean, sheeesh, is living in a galaxy having 400 billion star systems and having a diameter of 70000 light years not enough space to find a suitable exit point for the other side of said wormhole. I mean, its not like you can tell the difference that you're in another galaxy vs only 10000 light years away in the same galaxy.
Right, we're through the wormhole. Gee look, there are 3 planets here, all of them potentially life supporting (wow, imagine that, in the same solar system, but okay, I can stretch a bit of plausibility for good story telling). I think its safe to first choose that little planet over there thats orbiting that FRICKING MASSIVE BLACK HOLE, because gee, that seems like a real safe place to consider moving our entire human species as a possible safe haven for the rest of the future of humanity. (and I'm not even going to try to understand how they can decipher what the beacon is telling them from the previous downed ship with all the time dilation effects surrounding that planet)
Speaking of which, so the time dilation effects only affect the people on the planet. Apparently if you're in orbit, you're completely free of those effects. So the time dilation event horizon stops in the upper atmosphere because its, uh, closer to the black hole. Like orbiting the planet would never take you around to the other side of it thus making the orbiting ship closer to the black hole. Yeah, silly thinking on my part.
So our original plan of approaching the planet from underneath is going to waste a lot of fuel, here, let me draw a picture the depicts us saving a huge amount of fuel by using an approach vector that takes us ABOVE the planet instead. Stunned silence and everyone nods in agreement thinking, hey, wow, how come we never thought of that?
We've said good bye to the girl and we're dropping at a rapid pace toward the black hole event horizon, any moment now, the gravitational forces should be so strong that I'm expecting that ship to be completely disintegrated even before we hit the event horizon. I mean, ITS A FREAKING MASSIVE BLACK HOLE - not even light can escape. (And as a Hollywood aside, I think a huge opportunity was missed by actually NOT having a special effect showing the entry across the event horizon, but hey, thats just me). OK, honestly, I have a bit of a hard time believing that a black hole is a survivable thing. I enjoyed the Black Hole movie from Disney all those years ago, but have long since grown out of that mind set. Nothing in the movie showed me that the future 'helpers' had sufficient techonology to manipulate this kind of a force of nature.
OK, so we're trapped in a multidimensional room behind Murphs bookcase, we're trying to give her information to stop Cooper from leaving. So heres a good idea, lets give out the coordinates to the secret base that does exactly the opposite and catalyses the whole adventure in the first place, thus starting the story all over again.
Right, so the third and last planet really is a candidate for human habitation. Awesome. But wait, isn't this planet part of this same solar system that is STILL ORBITING A FREAKING HUGE BLACK HOLE that is slowly sucking all nearby matter into it? (OK, they didn't exactly say humans were ultimately going to live there, but they sure alluded to it) And really, what this point really boils down to is why bother surveying a system for habitaion that had a black hole for a sun in the first place. The original team should have just turned around and come back home. (Because I bet some of you might say that they werent really there looking for human habitats at all, but there specifically for the black hole. But then how come no one on the new mission questioned this before they set out on the mission, since they seemed to know what they were getting into?)
There were probably a few other questionable points, but these were the ones that stood out quite clearly for me.
And throughout all that dialogue, it may have been there, but I completely missed exactly what this whole gravity experiment was supposed to accomplish. Why did they NEED to get data from inside the black hole. (Yes, I know to complete the equation or something, but what was it all for? It sure didn't look like it was needed to save the human race.) Hopefully a second viewing will enlighten me. But that aside, there were way too many cheesy explanations for things. I know things needed to be explained simply, but it really came across a bit like a surfer boy getting a revelation into a new way to ride a wave. "Hey man, theres no them, man, its us. It was US that did all this. From the future, like, man." (OK, its just a dig at the dialogue, I think Mathew McConaughey is a decent enough actor on the whole)
And while I did think the robots were sort of cool, I also don't think their design is particularly practical. But I'm no engineer, so what do I know. I must add that I thought the robot was going to do a very cliched 'I've been programmed with a higher directive your existence is no longer useful' type plot twist, but I was pleasantly surprised that the robot was one of the good guys throughout the movie.
Having said all this, I did feel that there was a lot to like in the movie as well, and my hat goes off to Nolan for attempting something this ambitious. I'm just not quite sure that this will end up in my DVD collection the way Inception did.
Anyway, I was wondering whether we're going to see a Cooper Station around Saturn once Elite (full) is released into the wild.
That was quite a post and I'll try and give you some feedback. I'll use the same order on your bullet points. Will also have spoilers so click the button on your own risk if you haven't watched the movie
1- This fall into the "chosen one" category, yes I know it doesn't make much sense but as no one was supposed to find that base and the fact that his professor was heading the project, well made him the "Neo" of this movie.
2- I'm with you on this one, but I think they said gravity was different on those planets, assuming is way less than earth they could make it.
3- Totally agree, they should had at least a room or something on the edge of the spinning thing to get gravity.
4- I have two explanations for this: a) The wormhole was vacuuming everything hence getting the planets closer. b) They discovered that Super Cruise was a feature on their ship
5- I guess this was to make the movie more "epic" as going into another galaxy.
6- Agree with you, but maybe they went to the Prometheus school of science.
7- See point 6 but this time it was the writers.
8- I'll summarize this one "it's a movie".
9- Here I thought the movie was going to end in the old time paradox, were what happened already happened and cannot be changed and we were just seeing it from another perspective, reason why I did not liked the ending.
10- Again scientists in this movie went to the Prometheus school of science.
The gravity thing I did not understand either, maybe I'll have to watch it again, their accent was sometimes weird and English is not my native language
Edit:
Point 9: Now that I think about it and since the movie involves talking about dimensions, maybe he saved his daughter in another dimension not in his, it would have been an awesome end credits scene showing his dimension with humanity actually in demise (no I'm not a sociopath my mother had me tested)
Sorry to get off topic. I loved prometheus I even have the Bray, but the scientis in the movie are down right stupid, even after watching the deleted scenes doesnt make up for that. Still great movie as it was Interestellar, crossing my fingers for an alternate ending on blue ray showing a more grim future
People complaining about the robot. I think it was very imaginative not to have an android, maybe the shape was not the best but at least it wasnt a humanoidd robot or an R2D2, and to me, they were going for a HAL 9000 on steroids I was waiting for the robot at some point to say "Im sorry Cooper, Im afraid I cannot let you do that"
1. Black hole bookshelf mumbo jumbo. But as they did go that route, I would have preferred if they just had a long scene of white bright light and coopers talking/thinking in the background. Trying to portray a 5 dimensional portal to past and future just looked awful and silly. As they said, we cant comprehend it so why even bother trying to show it…
2. Stupid and illogically designed robot helpers with alot of needless humour for a dystopian drama movie.
I think i mentioned it earlier, but when the robat takes control of the docking process it actually uses its "arm" to control a joystick…Seriously…
3. Someone pointed this out already, but the spaceship could magically decend/ascend from first the waterplanet then the iceplanet without the need for additional engines. Just like star wars…
4. Completely needless action scene at the waterplanet, with a needless death. The one standing next to the spaceship the entire time somehow ends up dead, yet the one far far away and somehow unexplainably trapped under some wreckage survives….what the hell?
5. Once again needless heroic hollywood trash when cooper decided to send his only surviving companion alone to the last and "possibly" inhabitable planet while he himself goes for some sacrificing blackhole suicide, all this without even giving her a chance to decide for herself.
Had they both gone into the black hole she wouldnt have to be trapped all alone on some planet in another galaxy.
which leads me to…
6. At the end cooper goes on a quest to find this lady he forced to land on an unknown planet all alone.
I expect that in this future, mankind has indeed unlocked the secret of FTL travel thanks to his black hole experience. But does he know where to go? If so, why doesnt everyone else? And if they do, why havent they retreived her yet?
The fans of ED that we are, we know that our collective effort still wont discover the entirely of even our own galaxy, yet cooper decides to go on a hunt in the rest of the UNIVERSE to find this future love of his.
Okay there is more that annoyed the hell out of me in this movie, but I want to say that the only reason I feel so disappointed is because I expected so much. Nolan and hard sci-fi sounded too good to be true, and apperently it was.
Ill rewatch this movie on blueray down the line, and probably find it much more enjoyable as a regular sci-fi movie, but IMO Nolan hit the post with this one :/
Id rate it 3/5 overall, though acting and visuals where mostly superb!
I agree with most of your points, even though they didn't bother me too much (it's still a movie after all), but a couple of things:
- They used the disposable booster rocket in order to bring the ship into orbit without tapping into is own fuel reserves, which were required for the mission. It would have been reckless to use that fuel for the first take off if you still had other means to get them up there.
- You keep calling the black hole dangerous, but it isn't. A black hole has less mass than the star that it was before it collapsed, because the star died in a supernova, shedding most of its outer layer during the explosion. This is the real logical problem here, because that supernova would have ejected the planets into deep space.
Assuming that the planets are still there by movie magic: at regular distances the black hole has less gravitational pull than its former star, which - thanks to the inverse square law of gravity - should barely affect the rest of the system, except loosen up the orbits a bit. This only changes once you get close enough to the black hole for the exponential increase of gravity with closer proximity to have a real effect, all the way up to the event horizon, where the gravitational force exceeds the escape velocity of light. You'd have to get very close to the black hole to get in trouble, though. Closer than you would have been able to get to its former star, when it was still alive and kicking.
For all intents and purposes the average black hole is nothing but a tiny dark star, and not the all consuming stellar vacuum cleaner that people believe it to be. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but that's my understanding of black holes.
I saw the movie "Interstellar" last night... It was fabulously "Spacey" just like Elite, and there were some very super cool Spaceship Flying Action ! Edge of Seat stuff with a good story line too, but you need to be a bit of a space nut to truly understand some of the concepts presented.
Has anybody seen that movie too? What did you think of it?
Can anyone say Causality Paradox? It is the reason why most people reject the ending of the film as nonsense. The brain cannot logically work it out because it is illogical.
Apart from that, it's probably the best movie of its kind I've seen in a long while.
Can anyone say Causality Paradox? It is the reason why most people reject the ending of the film as nonsense. The brain cannot logically work it out because it is illogical.
Apart from that, it's probably the best movie of its kind I've seen in a long while.
It is like receiving an invitation to a party you know nothing about but only after you've been to the party that you didn't know about because you received an invitation that you sent yourself after being at the party.
It is like receiving an invitation to a party you know nothing about but only after you've been to the party that you didn't know about because you received an invitation that you sent yourself after being at the party.
It is like receiving an invitation to a party you know nothing about but only after you've been to the party that you didn't know about because you received an invitation that you sent yourself after being at the party.
Or in other terms: if you stop Skynet from being created, no terminator will be sent back in time to kill you. But if no terminator will try to kill you and no Kyle Reese will be sent back to save you, you will never learn about Skynet and Judgment Day in the first place and you will not have any knowledge or reason to stop Skynet from being created, thus resetting everything back to square one, with Skynet and Judgment Day happening after all. In order to prevent that paradox, Skynet and Judgment day must happen and cannot be prevented, no matter what. But of course that's only true if we don't have parallel universes. If we do the paradox can be solved by branching timelines.
Or in other terms: if you stop Skynet from being created, no terminator will be sent back in time to kill you. But if no terminator will try to kill you and no Kyle Reese will be sent back to save you, you will never learn about Skynet and Judgment Day in the first place and you will not have any knowledge or reason to stop Skynet from being created, thus resetting everything back to square one, with Skynet and Judgment Day happening after all. In order to prevent that paradox, Skynet and Judgment day must happen and cannot be prevented, no matter what. But of course that's only true if we don't have parallel universes. If we do the paradox can be solved by branching timelines.
If you had branching timelines, then you going back to tell you to do something about it does not change it for you and everyone dies, and the you that got the message never reaches the point where you send the message back in the first place, you've just created a new universe at which point you increase your ship size by four, get new hairdos and have your first officer get cosy with the communications officer, make better style choices by getting rid of the chunky flashy buttons and put in touch screens, and then discover that Ricardo Montalban is in fact Benedict Cumberbatch, or maybe it's the other way round... It gets confusing.
I completely agree, I thought it was an excellent movie, the first I really recall that has dealt with time dilation.....and yes I was teary eyed several times throughout the film!
Here! Have a virtual handshake <shake>. I especially liked the rescue on Miller's planet. It reminded me of Azimov's "Runaround".
I do have a question but it's nothing to do with the robots...
Do you know anything about this virtual reality thing they put together to promote the movie? Is it something that's going to be made available to the general public?
